Since its inception, the online advertising market has undergone massive growth with $27 billion exchanging hands in 2007, expecting to hit $147 billion by 2012. The most significant contributor to the online advertising market is the rapid spawning of ad networks. As the number of buyers and sellers increased, more ad networks emerged to serve as brokers for advertisers. Today, the online advertising market is an ever-expanding market fragmented by ad spending that has spread among 300+ disparate advertising networks worldwide including Google's AdSense, Yahoo!'s Publisher Network, HispanoClick, and Adtegrity. The abundance of these ad networks has created new challenges for websites trying to earn top dollar from the unsold ad space.
Currently, ad networks allow website publishers to generate revenue by placing advertisements from the ad networks on their webpages. In many Web applications and on many websites, advertisements are presented in the form of banners, graphic squares, text advertisements, video advertisements, pop-up and pop-under advertisements, Flash or other animated advertisements that move across the screen, etc. and displayed prominently on a web display, referred to as a “webpage.” Users attracted to an advertisement often “click” on the advertisement by positioning a screen cursor on the advertisement and then depressing a button on a mouse or other input device. By clicking on the advertisement, a “hyperlink” to another website, associated with the advertisement and usually the home site of the advertiser, generates a path to the advertiser's designated page. Typically, the name of the path is presented to the user in the form of a uniform resource listing (“URL”), such as “ABC—Inc.com,” followed by a directory path designating the particular page in the site that the advertiser wishes to be displayed, such as “/directory 13 name/page—name.”
By establishing a relationship with an ad network, unsold advertisement inventory on a website can be sold such that both the webpage publisher and the ad network benefit. These ad networks also build relationships directly with advertisers who make ad purchases. Ad networks then seek to match the advertisers they have relationships with to publishers they have relationships with, thereby maximizing the amount of space they can sell.